How does dialectal experience modulate anticipatory speech processing?

Abstract

Context-based predictions facilitate speech processing. However, details of predictive processing mechanisms and how factors like language experience shape facilitative processing remain debated. This electroencephalograph study aimed to shed light on these issues by investigating the effect of dialectal experience on lexical prediction. Stimulus sentences were produced in three Mandarin Chinese dialects (home dialect, familiar regional dialect, and unfamiliar regional dialect). Critical nouns varied between strong and weak predictability. Only when listening to the home dialect was an enhanced ERP deflection observed at the transitive verb before a strongly predictable object noun (compared to the weakly predictable condition); the ERP amplitude at the verb correlated significantly with the following noun’s predictability. The predictable object nouns elicited a reduced N400 in all three dialects but only an additional reduction in N1 in the home dialect condition. Conjointly, our results suggest that effortful meaning computation may partially underlie anticipatory lexical processing and that language experience modulates the way lexical prediction facilitates the early stage of acoustic/phonological processing (in addition to the later stage of meaning integration).